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Nick Dyer-Witheford 1844/2004/2044: The Return of Species-Being

Introduction
After a long period of neglect, the question of speciesbeing has resurfaced in Marxist theory, forming an important topic of discussion in recent works by David Harvey and Gayatri Spivak on capitalist globalisation, and in Jason Reads re-examination of the mode of production. 1 This outbreak is conjunctural, not coincidental. The problem Marx addressed in 1844 under the rubric of species-being was the appropriation by a nascent industrial capitalism of humanitys capacity to co-operatively change the conditions of its collective existence indeed, to transform its own very nature. In 2004, this issue is hurled back onto the table by a nascent informational capitalism the capitalism of the Human Genome Project and the World Wide Web with redoubled force, a force which, nonetheless, promises to be only a faint, anticipatory tremor of the convulsions to come by, say, 2044. This paper therefore continues the renewed discussion of speciesbeing, proposing that the young Marxs concept, remodulated by encounters with contemporary
1 Spivak 1999, pp. 7381; Harvey 2000, pp. 20632; Read 2003, pp. 7683, 908. See also Doubt 2000, pp. 616.

Historical Materialism, volume 12:4 (325) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Also available online www.brill.nl

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theory, clearly names the stakes in the emergence of high-technology capital and of global movements opposing it. The major site of Marxs account of species-being is the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (henceforward 1844 Manuscripts) and, in particular, his famous discussion of alienation.2 Here, Marx analyses how private ownership of the means of production subjects humans to a fourfold deprivation: estrangement from the products of their own labour; from cooperative relations with fellow beings; from the nature that is transformed through their activity; and, from their own historical possibilities of selfdevelopment, or species-being [Gattungswesen].3 Subsequently, species-being has had a chequered career within Marxism: prolonged invisibility, then brief popularity, followed by heavy criticism. Having adopted the concept from Feuerbach as a keystone in the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx shortly thereafter abandoned it, bar a eeting return in the Grundrisse. Because the 1844 Manuscripts were unpublished until 1932, speciesbeing did not enter the lexicon of Leninism. For this very reason, Western Marxisms, including the Frankfort school and various Freudo-Marxisms, embraced it after the Second World War, departing from Soviet orthodoxy via a critique of human alienation from innate capacities.4 This path was, however, no sooner opened than it was challenged by Louis Althussers claim that the works of 1844 lay on the wrong side of a fatal break, tainted with an idealism that the mature Marx rejected.5 From this point of view, the concept of species-being was connected to an essentialist concept of human nature unfolding in a teleological fore-ordained manner. Such a notion was anathema to an anti-humanism that believed the mature Marx had incinerated all philosophical notions of man in his analysis of modes of production that generated subjects purely out of the multilevelled machinations of their own apparatus. The concept of species-being has thus been for some time caught in stand-off between humanist Marxists who love it for its emancipatory lan and structuralist Marxists who scorn it for residual Hegelianism. There is, however, a more recent third position a diagonal move out of this impasse. This might be very approximately characterised as an afrmative,

2 3 4 5

Marx 1964, pp. 10619. The order of presentation here follows Ollman 1971, p. 138. See Fromm, 1961. On the history of this reception see Petrovic 1983, pp. 915. See Althusser 1969.

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autonomist, poststructuralist Marxist version of species-being. The starting point for such an interpretation is the unusual, and largely unnoticed, reinstatement of themes from the 1844 Manuscripts in Gilles Deleuzes and Flix Guattaris deliriously vitalist and resolutely anti-humanist Marxism.6 Further suggestions of such an account of species-being can be found not only in the works of Spivak and Read already mentioned, but also in a fascinating study by Joseph Margolis, and in the writings of Thomas Keenan.7 There are, moreover, connections to be drawn between the species-being of the 1844 Manuscripts and the Marxian version of biopolitics developed in Michael Hardts and Antonio Negris Empire.8 These connections are made explicit in Paolo Virnos recent, brief discussion of Gattungswesen in relation to concepts of multitude and general intellect.9 In what follows, I elaborate on these directions. Extracting such an interpretation of species-being from the 1844 Manuscripts is an act of retrospective reconstitution. Given Marxs brilliant inconsistencies, such a reading must sometimes work against the grain of the text, even as elsewhere it goes with the ow. This is not an effort aimed at antiquarian purity, but, rather, an attempt to cannibalise parts for a new intellectual machine adequate to contemporary conditions of virtual and biotechnological accumulation. It is archeological futurism, in the spirit of Walter Benjamins seizure of historical remembrances ashing up in a moment of danger.10

The present living species

Species-being is neither natural reproductive collectivity, nor a set of biological requirements for food, water, shelter, and sex. As Spivak points out, Marx tends to speak of these as species-life.11 Species-being is the fulllment, alteration and expansion of these life-needs through social activity, rendering life activity itself an object of will and consciousness.12 This involves, according to Marx, a combination of self-consciousness, material capacity, and collective organisation. In the process of humanisation,
See Deleuze and Guattari 1983. See Margolis 1992; Keenan 1993. I have also found Mulhall 1993 extremely useful, although he would probably reject categorisation alongside poststructuralist Marxists. 8 Hardt and Negri 2000. 9 Virno 2004, pp. 7780. 10 Benjamin 1969, p. 254. 11 Spivak 1999, pp. 7780. 12 Marx 1964, p. 67.
6 7

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these elements feed into each other in a bootstrapped, self-reinforcing loop of social co-operation, technoscientic competences and conscious awareness. Social activity transforms its natural basis. Species-being modies specieslife. What might be thought of as a supplement or outgrowth of biological existence rebounds to recongure the ground it springs from. Species-being is an emergent attribute life engendering life.13 That mans physical and spiritual life is linked to nature, Marx writes, means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature.14 Yet, the linkage he describes is anything but simple. Read closely, the 1844 Manuscripts oscillate between two propositions. The rst is that humans are, by nature, conscious and co-operative fabricators. The second is that humans consciously and co-operatively fabricate their own nature. The conjugation of these two afrmations generates a paradoxical formulation that of a species-being whose nature is to change its nature, and whose only essence is the capacity for transformation. Since species-being incessantly modies its own basis, its commonality can only be constantly recreated in the very acts of co-operation it appears to presuppose, founded in a shared foundationless condition: The human essence of nature rst exists only for social man. . . . Only here does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence.15 Species-being is thus not a given set of attributes but a socially constitutive power, a mobile and self-augmenting potentiality a virtuality. As Read, intentionally echoing the reections of the postmodern theorist Giorgio Agamben on potentiality and the coming community, puts it, species-being can be see as the undetermined possibility of this, that or whatever activity or the open possibility of any activity.16 This open potentiality created by intensications in species-being Marx refers to by universality, a term that, in the 1844 Manuscripts, acquires a rich connotative range. It suggests a geographically expanding, deterritorialising scope of social activity, involving the ever-larger, more varied and cosmopolitan communities of co-operation that are both the prerequisite and the result of enhanced species-being. But it also refers to ever-greater mutability, exibility,

13 14 15 16

Marx 1964, p. 113. Marx 1964, p. 112. Marx 1964, p. 137. Original emphasis. Read 2003, p. 78. Agamben 1993.

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and collective options, widening amplitude of feasible actualisations for differing forms of production, play and self-fulllment a growth of freedom. Expanded universality involves interplay between co-operative and cooperators, collectivity and its constituents. Marxs account of species-being is not a paean to an organic, functionalist super-being. Beings are not Borgs. Species-being is actualised to the degree that individuals not only contribute to the growth in social powers, but also access these powers as an increase in their own autonomy indeed, as the very grounds for their intensifying individuation.17 Species-being is neither individual nor supra-individual: it is transindividual, both the ground and compound of a multiplicity of particular species beings.18 Thus, alienation of species-being, the central problematic of the 1844 Manuscripts, is not an issue of estrangement from a normative, natural condition, but, rather, of who or what controls and limits the processes of ceaseless species self-development.19 Social systems that appropriate and sequester resources for particular strata or segments of species beings block or reverse the circular access of social and individual powers that enables the common growth of species-being. So, too since species-being is a capacity for conscious social change do forms that hand its direction to blind or out-of-control mechanisms. Hence the critique of capitalist alienation: the privatisation of species-being as property, and its direction by market exchange, forecloses wider, universal, development of species-being, and species beings. The conventional interpretation of the 1844 Manuscripts is as a clarion call for the recovery of human powers from such appropriation. The more radical reading is, however, to see the human as itself an historical instantiation of species-being, one bound in contradictory ways to the birth of capitalism. In this perspective, the advent of the world market generated the conditions of world-wide intercourse, the commodied equivalence of heterogeneous labours, and the techno-scientic apparatus necessary for the perception of evolutionary unity between the fragmented populations of rival feudal domains, tribes and castes. Thus Thomas Keenan argues Humanity arrives only with the domination of the commodity form, which makes it possible.20 This
Johnston 1995, pp. 17981, points out that one of the features that distinguishes Marxs use of the term from Feuerbachs is a more individualised notion of speciesbeing. 18 Balibar 1995, p. 19. 19 For an eloquent expansion on this point, see Margolis 1992, p. 38. 20 Keenan 1997, p. 18
17

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understanding of the human as a historical construct is one that glimmers within passages of the 1844 Manuscripts:
The real, active orientation of man to himself as a species being, or his manifestation as a real species being (i.e. as a human being) is . . . only possible through the cooperative action of all mankind as the result of history.21

This human moment of species-being is, however, at once generated and refused by capitalism. The same world market which creates the human also, however, by virtue of its commodifying operations, instantaneously denies this discovery to its exploited subjects, alienating the status of human as the rights and prerogatives of their masters, condemning millions to the status of beasts or machines. Capital is thus simultaneously a dynamically humanising force and systematically inhuman: a political economy that under the semblance of recognizing man . . . carries to the conclusion the denial of man.22 Thus, the great social struggles Marx observed, predicted and catalysed were indeed humanist species-being struggles to become human. The central site of such becoming-human struggles identied in the 1844 Manuscripts is, of course, that of the wage-labourer, and particularly the industrial proletarian. But the implications of its account of species-being are more extensive. Elements Marx identied as central to the unfolding of the present, living species include not only the co-operative organisation of labour, but also the harmonious relation of humans to their natural environment (nature linked to itself, for man is part of nature), the emancipation of women from masculine domination (from which one can judge how much man as a speciesbeing . . . has come to comprehend himself), and the global interconnection of people in increasingly cosmopolitan collectivities.23 Marxs pursuit of the full possibilities of his species-being theory was, however, stalled by often-remarked historical-personal blind-spots in regard conditions of domestic and colonial labour, and to the way capitalism at once galvanised and constrained contestation of sexism and racism. Equally, the degree to which a species-being critique of capital would involve issues not
21 Marx 1964, p. 174. Original emphasis. For a fascinating discussion of the historical formation of the human, see Fernndez-Armesto 2004, which appeared as this paper was being composed. 22 Marx 1964, p. 129. 23 Marx 1964, pp. 112, 129, 134.

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just of intra- but inter-species relations was despite some tantalising remarks on animal-human interactions the 1844 Manuscripts impeded by his oscillations between a rationalist triumphalism (mastery over nature) and what we would term an ecological perspective (metabolic interaction with nature). Nonetheless, contra Althusser, I suggest that Marx abandoned species-being, not because the concept was awed, but because he could not, in his era, go through with it. Early industrial capitalism allowed a prescient glimpse of the full mobilisation of planetary life as productive force. The subsumption was, however, insufciently concretely advanced for theoretical work to engage with its full scope, so that Marxs analysis subsequently retracted into the famous investigation of waged labour in the mechanised factory. Adequate disclosure of species-being had to await the full commodication of human social and ecological existence via web cast and xenotransplants and the contestation of this commodication by a range of new social subjects and combinations. This would be in accord with Marxs own dictum that the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete developments, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone.24 To revive the issue of species-being in 2004 is, however, to return to it in a context of a planetary high-technology capitalism where the constitution of the human now gures alongside the market-driven fabrication of the posthuman, an equally market-driven regression across large parts of the globe to prehuman conditions, and neo-exterminist risks of species termination. These are the issues on the agenda of counterglobalisation and antiwar movements of the beginning of the twenty-rst century, to whose situation we now turn.

Sketching in the ashes

The last decade of the twentieth century saw the eruption, in Chiapas, Paris, Seattle, Genoa, Porto Alegre, and countless other sites, of a new cycle of struggles against global capital. But 911 has recongured the context within which this cycle moves. The war on terror draws a dark, scorched line across the horizon towards which so many radical rivulets and transformative

24

Marx 1973, p. 104.

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tributaries were owing, as all types of dissent are delegitimated and attacked in a context of normalised mass death and social destruction. In this new situation, it is no longer feasible (if it ever was) to think within the binary framework: Empire vs. Multitudes.25 The conjuncture requires an analysis that comprehends not just at the World Trade Organisation and the Zapatistas, but also Al Quaeda (not to mention all the Christian, Hindu, Judaic and other theocratic fundamentalisms). Sketching in the ashes of a global war scenario, I propose a triangulation between three points: the logic of neoliberal capitalism. I call this the logic of the world market. It interpellates a planet of market subjects: human commodities; b) the logic of exclusionary ethno-nationalist-religious movements. I call this the logic of fundamentalist reaction. It addresses a planet lethally divided amongst chosen peoples; c) the logic of collective creativity and welfare proposed by the counterglobalisation and antiwar movements. It speaks to a planet of commoners. I call this the logic of species beings A whole series of molecular energies are currently being attracted, apportioned and annihilated between these three molar aggregates. The world market and fundamentalist reaction are apparently opposed, antagonists in the war on terror. But they are mutually dependent on and produce each other: fundamentalist reaction responds defensively against the universalising commodication of the world market. The world market, having armed and cultivated various chosen peoples such as the mujahadeen as agents of destruction of state socialism, now legitimates and vindicates its military expenditures and security apparatus waging war on fundamentalist reaction. Indeed, the world market and fundamentalist reaction each contain one another (for example, fundamentalist Christianity in Bushs USA, market dependence of radical Islamic rgimes). Each relies on the other to supply the dimensions of social existence (ethico-communal cohesion or economic structure) it cannot realise through its own, inherent logic.26 Neither the world market nor fundamentalist reaction is a unitary force. Both are characterised by competitive, ssiparous tendencies: the hostility of,
Hardt and Negri 2000, p. 393. A good basic outline of this dynamic is Barber 1995, who, however, falls down seriously when it comes to alternatives to and counter-powers against this catastrophic reciprocity.
25 26

a)

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on the one hand, contending chosen peoples (fundamentalist Christians vs. Jews vs. Islam vs. Hindus, and so forth), and, on the other hand, trade blocs of competing capitals (North America vs. Europe vs. Asia).27 Played out over a planetary eld now saturated with the weapons of mass destruction originally spawned by capital in its ght with state socialism, the conicts of world market and fundamentalist reaction, combined and crosscut with the conicts internal to each of these categories, drive towards social and ecological catastrophe, either through the direct effects of war, or the indirect effects of sustained inattention to problems such as HIV/AIDS, global warming, and mass impoverishment. On the other hand, both market subjects and fundamentalist identities can be seen as attacking the logic of global commons enunciated by movements of species beings.

Streets full of species-beings

The eruptions of resistance to neoliberalism that burst out on the cusp of the new millennium have been variously termed anti-free trade, counterglobalisation, new-internationalist, civil-society movements. Suggestive as these names are, they are inadequate to recognise the scope of the issues at stake in the emergence of these movements. Such mobilisations are not just, or primarily, about work, trade, and social justice although they are certainly about all these. They are rebellions generated within and against a capitalism that is global, both in its planetary expansion and its ubiquitous social penetration, and whose processes generate subjects able to envisage, and willing to fulll, the universalisms the world market promises but cannot complete. This suggestion is broadly consonant with Michael Hardts and Antonio Negris account of a multitudinous insurgence of biopower against Empire, and with John McMurtrys analysis of an antagonism between life sequences and money sequences.28 These new activisms are species-being movements, or, perhaps, movements of species beings. Features that support such characterisations include:
27 Failure to recognise this last point is the weakness of Hardt and Negri, whose emphasis on the cohesive logic of capital as a whole comes at the expense of neglecting the rivalrous action of individual capitals that constitute the system. This results in a Kautskyan theory of super-imperialism, which cannot comprehend the possibilities such as an antagonistic split of Empire into Rome (USA) and Constantinople (China). 28 Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 2531; McMurtry 2002, p. 163.

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Multiplicity. The diversity of agencies involved reects a situation of hyper-subsumption, where, while classical forms of exploitation persist and are often intensied , capital taps the psychophysical energies of species-life at every point on its circuit: not just as variable capital (labour), but also, as a circulatory relay (consumerist consciousness, mind share), a precondition of production (the general pool of biovalues and communicative competences necessary for general intellect), and even as constant capital (genetic raw materials). Species-being movements contest the general exploitation of communal human nature.29 ii) Gender. These movements would be inconceivable without the emancipation of women at once initiated and contained by the world market. This is evident in the role of women as theorists and leaders, and the enunciation of a feminist critique of political economy around issues such as globalised female work, unremunerated domestic labour, the double shift, sexual exploitation, procreative rights, and degeneration of the welfare state. iii) Ecology. The centrality of concerns such as biodiversity loss, global warming, ozone depletion, water privatisation, and felling of rain forest marks the emergence a green critique of capitals universal poisoning of the environment.30 The meeting of sea turtles with steelworkers on the streets of Seattle is emblematic of this. iv) Cosmopolitanism. Anti-globalisation is a wild misnomer for movements formed on a terrain of transnational exchanges and communications. The intensied mobility of nance, production and markets has set in motion a series of regional and international interactions amongst activists opposing various facets of global capital. Terms such as anti-corporate globalisation, counterglobalisation, new internationalism, globalisation from below, global justice attempt to capture this: Spivaks globe girdling movements is perhaps most evocative.31 To say these are movements of species beings is not to deny that the assemblies of Seattle, Genoa, Porto Alegre and Mumbai are rife with contradictions. They include nationalist protectionists, liberal market reformists, welfare-state
29 30 31

i)

Marx 1964, p. 148. Marx 1964, p. 85. Spivak 1999, p. 311.

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nostalgists and isolationist fascists. One reason for the popularity of civilsociety terminology amongst the movements platform speakers may be that its vagueness covers up these tensions. But to speak of species-being movements is to suggest that, amongst these heterogeneous elements, the genuinely new, and most dynamic, are biopolitical activisms, characterised by cosmopolitan afnities, transnational egalitarianism, implicit or explicit feminism, a strong ecospheric awareness, a practical critique of high technology, opposed to both the world market and reactive fundamentalisms

Cognitive capital, cyberactivism and contestational biologists

What are at stake in the emergence of species-being movements are new forces of production, communication and destruction generated by a hightechnology cognitive capitalism. 32 These include digitalisation and biotechnology and the new weapons potential arising from them. These are effecting what can only be described as species-changing shifts in technosocial conditions that promise to alter collective conditions at levels that are genetic (corporeal), environmental (habitat), communicative (speech, culture) and survival (war), on a scale that is often referred to as posthuman.33 Underlying the movements of species beings is a demand that these impending and ongoing transformations be managed from below in the sense not only of being able to say a yes or a no to options, but also of having the resources to reformulate options and re-conceive solutions in a manner tending towards the equalisation of improvements and burdens. The world market attacks species-being by appropriating and privatising the collective, co-operative forces that change species-life (through corporate control of new technologies); fundamentalist reaction attacks species-being by forbidding and repressing the changes in species-life that collective co-operation enables (through theocratic censorship and prohibition of new technologies). In terms of issues of communication: the logic of the world market is that of the global image-empires of Murdoch and Berlusconi; that of fundamentalist reaction is ltering, censorship and death sentence for dissenting journalists and artists; that of species-being movements is peer-to-peer and open-source networks.
32 33

Moulier-Boutang 2000. See Hayles 1999, and Fukuyama 2000.

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In terms of the life science and biorevolution: the logic of the world market is that of patented life forms; that of fundamentalist reaction is prohibition of unnatural experimentation; and that of species-being movements is public ownership, prioritising the meeting of basic life needs, and responsible risk assessment. Species-being movements contest the corporate trajectory of both digital and biotechnologies. In the case of new media, this contestation often, but not always, takes the form of re-appropriation. In the case of biotechnologies it often, but not always, takes the form of a refusal of high-technology lifeengineering. What is common is the attempt to intervene from below in technoscientic life-alteration, and to open channels for it other than those determined by commodication. In the eld of communications networks, an explosion of alternative or indy media has accompanied a critique of the corporate medias ltering of social information. This includes the radical press, community radio, tactical television experiments and video activism. Probably the most dramatic innovation, however, has been the widespread use of the internet for selforganisation, circulating news, speeding internal communication, connecting with potential allies, weaving an electronic fabric of struggle.34 The picture is different in the area of biotechnologies, where refusal is more apparent. In the global South, resistance to biopiracy and bioprospecting by multinational pharmaceutical companies has been intense. So, too, is opposition to agribusinesss coercive marketing of proprietarily controlled seed strains: in Europe and Canada, opposition to genetically modied (GM) foods and products such as bovine growth hormone have been widespread and successful. The rejection of biotechnology may cast doubt on nomination of these new activisms as species-being movements, for it seems to repudiate the naturetransforming capacities about which Marx waxed enthusiastic. And there are certainly many in such resistances who reject the biotechnological in the name of natural or divine essences. Such positions tend towards green-tinged forms of fundamentalist reaction. For other activists, however, the issue is not biotechnology per se but the corporate determination of its directions and deployment, and related issues of trustworthy research, testing, and labeling. Thus, recent proponents of contestational biology declare that the real question is how to create models

34

Cleaver 1994, p. 15.

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of risk assessment that are accessible to those not trained in biology so that people can differentiate between innovations that amount to little more than pollutants for prot and those that have a practical and desirable function.35 Many theorists and organisations ghting corporations such as Monsanto can envisage a benign role for biotechnologies in a context where the direction and velocity of their development is not prot-propelled. Some say that their stance is not a rejection of the life-sciences revolution, but the adoption of an alternative path within it, leading not towards the engineering of discrete genes, but to the more ecological analysis of holistic life systems.36 The stance of todays species-being movements towards high technology thus mixes appropriation and rejection, invention and sabotage, hacking and neo-Luddism, web-casters and seed gatherers. It is quite possible today to encounter activists ghting genetic patenting via computer networks. Such an ensemble can seem incoherent, but may just be discriminating. If speciesbeing entails conscious social choice about human self-transformation, it must involve the capacity to say both yes or no to technological options. In Jrgen Habermass terms, species-being movements seem to be working on developing a species-ethics by saying an emphatic yes to the possibilities of enhancing communicative reason through high-technology media, a nearly equally emphatic no to the instrumental reason of genetic engineering, and using the former to combat the latter.37

Global public goods and the new commons

Commons is a recurrent term in species-being activism. Its signals a focus on access to and regulation of collective resources, around issues ranging from digital culture to plant breeding to atmospheric pollution and the global water supplies. This commons discourse resumes older discussions about public goods, but breaks new ground, both in the range of ecological, biogenetic and cultural domains it addresses, and in its interest in the possibilities of organisation of resources from below, rather than according to the models of command economies or bureaucratic welfare states. High technologies, in both their communicational and biological aspects, intensify the socialisation of productive activity, both in terms of the social

35 36 37

Critical Art Ensemble 2002, pp. 45. See Rifkin 1998. Habermas 2003, p. 37.

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co-operation required for research and development, and by generating collective consequences that cannot be reckoned in terms of individualised market exchange. In the case of digital networks, these consequences include new modes of product creation and circulation, such as peer-to-peer networks and opensource software, which y out of the orbit of the commodity-form. These potentials are expressed in the creative commons and open cultures movements contesting the intellectual property rgime of the world market.38 In the case of biotechnologies, commons aspects are most apparent in the multiplication of possible public harms from irresponsible experimentation and premature application. But public-good aspects involving defence against planet-sweeping epidemics are also visible: the transnational campaign against pharmaceutical capital to compel affordable access to anti-HIV retrovirals is a case in point.39 The more capital deploys digital and biological technologies to enclose informational, ecological and biotechnological domains within the market, the more it intensies market externalities. Commons discourse restores these processes creative possibilities fettered, destructive dimensions unaccounted for to view. The conict between capital and species-being movements maps very approximately onto rival models of technological development: in media, open-source and peer-to-peer networks versus proprietorial code and closed systems; in life sciences, systemic biology and ecosystemic perspectives against reductive genetic engineering. The tendency of species-being movements is towards the practical realisation of what Marx termed communal activity, and communal mind.40

Alien powers
The importance of commons movements can only be measured against the counter-tendency towards social polarisations that give a new vitality to that most exhausted of terms, alienation. The central problem Marx raised under this heading, namely the seizure as private property of collective species-capacities, is, in the age of Monsanto,

38 39 40

See Lessig 2001. See Mayne 2002. Marx 1964, p. 137.

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Bristol-Meyers and Merck, more acute than ever. But alienation takes on a whole new urgency when it reaches up to the creation of alien life forms designed specically and solely for their functionality to capital.41 Such forms onco-mice, spider-goats, and terminator seeds already exist, very concrete expressions of the power of money to a world upside-down the confounding and compounding of all natural and human qualities.42 Biotechnologies generate not only designed animal and plants, but also alterations in the most apparently basic givens of the human condition: appearance, health, emotional and intellectual faculties, longevity, and sexuality. Germline interventions might make such changes inheritable. Futurists speak of a moment at which a technologically transformed humanity would become as alien to its former self as humanity is today from, say, great apes: a posthuman singularity. Marxs account of species-being qualies apocalyptic accounts of the posthuman, for it reminds us that humans have long been forming themselves in a technologically mediated relation with a second nature, in a series of grafts, symbioses and prosthesis with machines, buildings, altered nutrients and landscapes: in this sense, the species has always been posthuman.43 But Marxs critique also condemns the direction of this process by an inhuman power of accumulation.44 His account of species-being reduced, as labour, to the status of beasts or machines opens to a consideration of the posthuman as catastrophe, not by reason of deviation from a supposedly essential nature but from an unequal scheduling of departure times, or because some step onto the train across the backs of others. Every extrapolation from the present suggests that access to voluntary biotechnological transformations will be deeply income-dependent. The combination of powerful biotechnologies with vast differentials in wealth and global health-care systems shaped by neoliberal privatisation is a recipe for market eugenics very different from its ill-fated state-run predecessors. Positive and negative selection will be left to the survival instincts and pocket book of individuals in system where employment possibilities are dependent on a clean genetic proles, or even bio-modications, bringing into sight the jawdropping possibility of the transformation of classes into clades.

41 42 43 44

See the valuable discussion by Rikowski 2003. Marx 1964, p. 169. Hayles 1999, pp. 2789. Marx 1964, p. 156.

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Techno-apartheids and digital divides already contribute to vast differentials in human life chances around the planet. The sovereign power of the market decrees that most of the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, are excluded from anything that the liberal citizenry of the planetary North would consider as a properly human existence. Market-driven globalisation exacerbates ethnic envy and hatred between frustrated, impoverished majorities and market dominant minorities.45 To this situation we may soon add the bio-rifts produced by a neoliberal eugenics that makes the masters of the planetary economy more and more literally alien from those they rule. It is the prospect of a posthuman made on the basis of the inhuman that renders species-being movements insistence on the common so vital. This commonality cannot, however, be conceived as maintenance of or reversion to any primordial, natural state, but only as an egalitarian order to be achieved. The programme it demands is one of equalisation of conditions, giving a primacy to the meeting of elementary needs of species-life for everyone. Absent this, the technological modications of species-being will follow an inhuman path towards the war of the posthuman against the not-yet-allowedto-be-human.

Neo-exterminism
This situation may already be upon us. 9/11 brings to a crescendo what many heard approaching: confrontation between the techno-cultural whirlwind of cognitive capitalism and an array of religious-ethno-nationalist fundamentalisms arising as a defensive response to the immiseration and disruptions of the world market: McWorld versus Jihad.46 Marx identied two forms in which species-being is alienated: capital and religion.47 Each abstracts from, substitutes and imposes over the species collective, co-operative capacity for self-organisation a fetishised authority money or divinity. Capital privatises material wealth; religious institutions sequester spiritual experience. The world market embraces the dynamic mutation of human technocultural possibilities, at the expense of all collectivity; religious fundamentalisms maintain social collectivity, but on the basis of xed, divinely-sanctioned identities and hierarchies.
45 46 47

Chua 2003, p. 16. Barber 1995. Marx 1964, p. 111.

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In the war on terror, these two alienated forces turn on each other. Having colluded to annihilate the previously existing socialisms, neoliberal capital and reactionary fundamentalisms face off, fangs bared. The grimace is deceptive, since each partial, alienated antagonist actually requires and internalises the other. Bush is evangelical, relying on fundamentalist Christianity to discipline the social maelstrom of American turbo-capitalism; bin Laden is a scion of oil capital and lacks any economic programmatic alternative to the world market. But this only intensies the animosity. Both are hostile to the forces of Seattle and Porto Alegre, though each sees them as a manifestation of its opponents logic, as terrorism or decadence. Thus, the widely felt intuition that the war on terror is somehow aimed against counterglobalisation, recently articulated by Slavoj Zizek, requires no conspiracy theory: whoever moved rst, CIA or mujahadeen, 9/11 resulted from the interaction of two forces antithetical to species-being.48 What makes this a true dialectic of disaster is an aspect of technology that Marx undoubtedly scanted its power not as means of production, but of destruction.49 The new technologies of cognitive capitalism are rooted in military purposes. They arose from the nuclear confrontation with state socialism. The entire trajectory of computerisation, as well as substantial portions of the new life sciences, would by unthinkable without this deadly matrix. The spectre of mutually assured destruction can be seen as a via negativa to humanitys practical self-recognition of its planetary unity. The mass anti-nuclear movements of 1960s and 1980s were perhaps the rst species-being mobilisations, predecessors of todays globalisation from below. During the Reaganite Second Cold War, E.P. Thompson coined the term exterminism to name the mutual momentum of rival military-industrialscientic systems apparently spiralling to disaster.50 The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to vitiate this idea. But the war on terror brings back this dynamic, in revised form. Neo-exterminism presents itself not as the massied confrontation of Pentagon and Kremlin, but rather in exibilised, diffuse, post-Fordist form, in the frantic attempt of advanced capital to prevent the real or imagined spread of increasingly generalised, miniaturised and handy weapons of mass destruction that might threaten it hegemony. Underlying this metastasising

48 49 50

Zizek 2002. Aronson 1983. Thompson et al. 1982. See also Balibar 2002.

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dynamic, and the surgical strikes with which established power attempt to manage it, lies, once again, capitals inability to control the high technology it has unleashed, overlaid on the vast global inequalities we have already discussed, and on the confrontation between world market and fundamentalist reaction. In neo-exterminism, the most amazing techno-scientic expressions of species-being powers appropriated by capitalists and fundamentalists alike will not appear as retrovirals and open-source software, but, instead, as swarms of robotised battle-drones chattering to each other in the skies over smoky landscapes as they search for mobile, weaponised smallpox laboratories. If the legacy of the 1844 Manuscripts can only be recovered for contemporary use by cutting it loose from Hegelian teleology (and, here, I concur with Althusser) then it needs to be recognised that species-being may come to a sticky end; augmented universality can be actualised as universal destruction.51 Neo-exterminism does not, yet, offer the big bang conclusion to speciesbeing of nuclear winter; but it does promise slow degradation into persistent war, economic wastage and universal fear, a dynamic that in current conditions of global interdependence may be as mortal. It is an understanding of this possibility that made the forces that in 2000 appeared on streets of Seattle reappear in 2003, as the largest peace movement the planet has ever seen opposing the invasion of Iraq.

The return of the plan

Other current manifestations of species-being logic today include: campaigns for global water access, the struggle against the HIV/AIDS epidemic; the redirection of medical research towards diseases that afict the poor, young South, rather than towards the posthuman North; movement to reduce and regulate the unevenly inicted consequences of global warning; mobilisations against the patenting of life forms and for the proper social control of biotechnologies; and, centrally, action against the obscenity of global wealth inequalities. Such movements against the privatising power of the world market need, however, to be more clearly linked with another, parallel, range of struggles against the obscurantist logics of fundamentalist reaction. These struggles include womens resistance to re-impositions of patriarchal discipline and the
51

See Rees 2003.

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defense of ethnic and religious minorities. Without a stronger link between these two wings of a species-being movement, the war on terror will successfully wrap itself in the ag of enlightened liberation even while relentlessly deepening the grip of the world market. The task of the species beings is to disentangle themselves from and neutralise the world market and fundamentalist reaction before these two antagonists bring irreparable planetary collapse, through war and negligence. This is the contemporary inection of the civilisational choice Marx and Luxemburg posed when they wrote that, in the absence of socialism, the options were capitalism or barbarism Many think the very best to hope for is a system of cosmopolitan social democracy that hedges the world market around with a series of globalised welfare-state institutions.52 This is a decent, responsible objective for which to struggle, but not enough. The world market has summoned up powers whose consequences it cannot control or even measure. The management of a range of global eco-metabolic problems, including not only biotechnological risks but climate and atmospheric change, pandemics and water and energy supply, require institutions of oversight, testing, risk assessment, public resource management and regulation, and collective education in short, social planning, and on a scale to make previous efforts look retiring.53 The new information technologies created by cognitive capital makes such governmentality feasible. The networked surveillance and simulation systems deployed to wage the war on terror could be turned to monitoring and avoiding the social and biospheric ruination of the planet. Yet the possibilities of panoptic despotism are obvious. What can countervail against these risks are the equal potentialities for transparency, creativity and assemblage created by the new mesh of globally networked communication, potentialities now being vigorously explored by a host of social movements and individuals.54 Indeed, in an era when the notion of social planning has been discredited and disparaged under the assaults of neoliberalism, one of the benets of theoretical return to the young Marx is in re-afrming the role of collective design in the actualisation of species-being. The recent recovery of the speciesbeing theme by David Harvey, while proceeding on very different theoretical lines from those followed here, is invaluable on this point, for his discussion,
52 53 54

See Held and McGrew 2002. See the critique of Held in Smith 2003. See Dyer-Witheford 1999, pp. 192218.

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grounded in studies of urban geography, emphasises the architectural components of collective deliberation, foresight and preguration in all projects of social emancipation.55 This brings us back to one of the very few overt allusions to the species-being in the work of the older Marx his statement that, when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality and develops the capacity of this species.56 Realising the logic of species-being movements requires more than the romanticism of spontaneous rhizomatic connections. It calls for revival of a very unfashionable idea global collective planning, but on a basis that avoids the disastrous legacy of the Leninist command state in favour of truly participatory processes. The technological possibilities that the world market has itself excited contain the possibility of a counter-subsumption that will give commodication a declining role in a human future. It is this context that makes the young Marx germane today, for, as Read observes, the 1844 Manuscripts articulate more forcefully than any other of his works except perhaps the Grundrisse, a critique of the present from the possibility latent within it.57

Conclusion
More wars are impending, both within and between the halves of a planet that commodication is rapidly dividing between the posthuman and those denied humanity. In such a situation, averting new holocausts depends, as ever since 1844, on asserting against capitals constraint and stratication of species-being the priorities of the common. It is tempting to speak of a mission to save the human. But this would be a ight departing too late. The human is a historical creature whose material and ontological grounds are already well and truly subverted. The complex articulation of biological facts and discursive formations from which it was constructed have been chiselled loose by technoscience; tremulous in 2004, they will, by 2044, under the hammer blows of molecular biology, neuroscience and nanotechnologies, be rapidly falling away into the abyss. Deprived of a naturalistic basis in commonsense humanity, or in common human senses, the new solidarity can only be grounded in the immanent, co-operative requirements of the productive

55 56 57

Harvey 2000, pp. 20612. Marx 1977, p. 447. Read 2003, p. 123.

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networks that sustain biosocial existence, and make possible its further unfolding. If the human is passing, neither a regression to the atavistic divisions of the prehuman, realised today as ethnic cleansings, or a triumphalist celebration of a posthumanism whose high-technology requirements come at the expense of millions who want, not for implants and nanotechnologies, but for water, medicine, and food, are an emancipatory option. Rather, it is time to say that the prehuman, human and posthuman have all, as categories inextricably tied to the historic inequalities of the world market, had their day. The cancellation of these inequalities demands a new commonism, a project neither of goddesses, nor of cyborgs, nor even of humans, but, instead, of species beings.

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